This paper tests the relationship between time preferences and crime rates as posited by Davis (1988), whose theoretical analysis suggests that individuals’ attitude towards the future significantly affect their propensity to commit crime. Our empirical analysis is based on a panel of Italian...

Investment decisions are usually affected by what firms perceive as government supply constraints: when a firm considers whether to increase its capital stock it takes into account possible constraints due to the lack of public productive services. Introducing this consideration in a simple...

We show that in contexts characterized by scarce civicness, opportunistic politicians can advantageously exploit the promise of low tax enforcement to win the elections, although at the cost of both higher public debt and a lower quality of the goods publicly provided. We offer a theoretical...

Markup fluctuations are often the combined outcome of sources of variability with conflicting effects. We exploit a natural experiment framework based on episodes of unanticipated cuts in city council spending and of firm exits from the market to investigate the markup response to contractions...